In Defense of Emotional Eating

These days everyone is talking health. People are gaining an awareness of what they put in their bodies. One thing most people seem to agree on is that food is fuel. Some however take that a step further saying that food is just fuel. Because of that little “just” we should not eat to reward ourselves, to soothe or manage our emotions. Emotional hunger is different from physical hunger, so they say. They strongly caution against reaching for comfort foods when feeling blue. While we can appreciate the message, our relationship with food is far more sophisticated, than that.

Discovering Our Relationship with Nourishment

Our relationship with nourishment started in the womb where our needs were consistently met. We were neither hungry nor thirsty nor cold nor in want. Our relationship with hunger arrived at the same time as our relationship with separation and need. The need for nourishment and comfort was met the same way: breastfeeding. A baby’s social interaction and psychological development cannot be separated from his food supply. That right there is the foundation of each and every individual’s relationship with food.

Small wonder that when we need soul-soothing we turn to “comfort foods” or when we need social interaction it more often than not centers around a meal. This isn’t a bad thing. It’s not something that needs to be corrected. It is just as it ought to be. How many of us, returning home from a long trip, look for one special food? Maybe it is your mom’s lasagna or maybe the berries you picked with your grandma. Just the smell can immediately take you back to a place and time. Emotional eating is the closest thing I’ve experienced to time travel.

Celebrating Comforting Foods of Childhood

My husband is from Mongolian. After we married I lived there for several years. While living there I never bothered to learn to make Mongolian food. It was easily accessible. Then we moved to the United States. For quite sometime, I obliviously ignored my husband’s comfort foods. Finally one day he asked, well, maybe begged, for me to make Mongolian Steamed Dumplings. It dawned on me that he had never been away from his home and culture for such a long time.

He craved the nostalgia in a cup of salty milk tea and steamed mutton. I didn’t know much about making Mongolian food, but I had seen it done. So I began my journey of becoming one of the few Non-Mongolians in or out of Mongolia that can totally rock such dishes as Tsoivan, Buuz, and Suutei Tsai. For my husband’s long sojourn out of Mongolia, it’s as much emotional food as it is physical. In fact, I’ve learned that after a stressful day, Mongolian food means more to him than anything else.

What if comfort foods really did comfort?

The problem of obesity and diet-related disease is not that we eat for comfort. It’s that we eat junk for comfort and overeat it when we do. The baby who turns to his mother’s breasts for food and comfort is getting a nutrient-dense source of life. When we turn to fast-food we are getting nothing. Hence the need to keep searching and keep eating. It’s like going back to your Ex for comfort knowing full-well he or she has let you down every single time. Time to replace the Ex, not swear off love altogether!

What if comfort food really did comfort? What if it really did feed our bodies at the same time soothe our souls? When you want to reach for the candy-bar, reaching for a piece of the darkest chocolate instead, takes intentionality. But, we can relearn and our taste-buds are trainable.

Good Mood Foods

Some foods are naturally better than others at helping to balance your mood. Here are some great go-to foods when you need a pick-me-up.

Eating for Comfort and Nourishment

Involve all your senses, as does the baby at the breast. Don’t just shovel it in. Present it beautifully on a plate. Enjoy it.

Try to eat with others. Proper eating is as much social as it is physiological. Enjoying food in the context of company causes us to enjoy it more, eat slower, and consequently, eat less.

Sit down. We have a rule in our house that we don’t eat standing up. Even if you are alone, don’t eat over the sink or even walking down the street. If you get take out, take it somewhere (a park, a bench, home), sit down and savor it.

Cultivate gratefulness. This may be easy to do if you are eating to celebrate a promotion or buying a home. This may be more difficult if you have just lost a job or received bad news. Yet, eating with gratefulness causes us to digest our food better, enjoy it more and to be more aware. We do this by pausing to light a candles, to say a prayer, to slow down.

Food is a pleasure, a source of joy, an integral part of culture, and critical to the well-being of our whole person.

About Daja and Kristina

Daja and Kristina of The Provision Room are passionate about home-centered living! Their days are spent homeschooling, planting gardens, writing books, speaking at retreats and having long Sabbath afternoons eating cheese and sipping wine with their husbands. They share it all in The Provision Room - your source of inspiration for abundant, home-centered living.

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What people are saying

This is a lovely post, and I found myself nodding along with your wisdom. Yes, hunger developed at the same time as separation, beautiful image. Why shouldn’t the food we eat comfort and nourish us? Of course it should. It’s not food’s fault that we choose the wrong foods (like the wrong men 🙂 ) and then eat too much of it. Lovely xo

I love this. It almost bring me to tears. I have been trying to relay this same thing to my mom. Both of us have struggled with our weight all our lives. Well, maybe not so much “weight” as body image. I have been a size 18 (now a size 12), but my mom has hardly ever been bigger than a 12. She is so obsessed, and I have never known her when she was not on a diet or berating herself for liking food. This mentality rubbed off on my sister and me, of course, and if we are not on some sort of “regimen”, we are talking about how fat we are. My sister eats nothing but junk. I eat very well, but the weight is always a struggle to keep off. It struck me a few months ago at how unhealthy it is to constantly be acting as if food is something to be ashamed of, controlled all the time, and fenagled into a “program” where one drinks smoothies made of rice protein powder and green sludge. I don’t know. I’m just so tired of the struggle. Thanks for being a voice of reason.

This is beautiful! And so true! My grandmother always had macaroni and cheese waiting for us when we came to visit – her face peering out the kitchen window at the top of the mountain. The gravel spun as we neared the end of our journey and we rushed inside for hugs and then her fixin’s!

I appreciate how you call our attention back to what often creates the issue of obesity and diet-related disease is a lack of self-control and/or awareness of how to replace poor quality ingredients with nourishing ingredients.

This is such a great article! I love the distinction between comfort food and junk food–I think that’s so important to highlight. As you mentioned, junk food isn’t real food, so craving a homemade meal that your grandmother made is different than a cheeseburger from a fast food joint. I believe trying to disconnect food from our emotions creates more negative associations with food. Instead, it can be helpful to listen to your cravings, and figure out just what they are trying to tell you. Thanks for posting!

A great post. For those if us with autoimmune that have adjusted our diets to try to make things better and have gotten so food obsessed that it’s easy to lose sight of food being a friend instead of the enemy. I nice reminder for me that although most of my comfort foods are no no for autoimmune protocol the nourishment gained on all levels can serve me better then complete abstinence. And I need to get rid of the guilt as that does more harm then eating a few nuts!

Thank you for writing this post. I never thought about the relationship between comfort foods and breastfeeding, but it makes perfect sense. You are right, comfort foods in and of themselves aren’t bad; it’s the overeating of the wrong types of foods that is bad. I think that if God didn’t intend for eating to be a pleasurable act, He wouldn’t have provided us with such variety. I love this post!

This is a great article. Food needs to be satisfying both physically and emotionally. I have realized his when I go on these so called Heath kicks and I don’t eat he same food as my husband. It is definitely , soul satisfying when I make a great dish and everyone enjoys it. Love he comparison of going to an ex. I will remember that when I try to fix or satisfy myself with a bag of chips.

Makes sense. I eat whatever I crave when I’m sick and have discovered that those foods are high in vitamin C and protein. Maybe when you are emotional and craving a food it’s, well of course it’s the memories and the sense of everything being right in the world, but maybe also you’re craving the nutrients.

I have always thought this and have had some very great cooks in my family. Even what my mom could scrape together that would gross out some people really appeal to me to try new recipes and augment my openness to a variety of foods. However, chronic diseases that result from diet and lack of physical activity are rampant in many communities and populations that experience lack of diverse food environment, little nutrition education, and/or inability to afford certain comfort foods. Many young children experience comfort foods as the bag of chips or gumming a french fry as their first comfort foods off or during breast feeding.

There is hope, many organizations are trying to promote food justice to include education, fun (because food should be enjoyable as well as nourishing), and economic growth. BTW I love this blog!

I’ve always distinguished between ‘refueling’ and ‘eating.’ It’s unfortunate when life is off kilter and hectic and all we can do is refuel. Eating really can nourish body and soul. I like that you make it a point to sit down. I make my kids do this- but more to contain the mess. I need to remember to make myself sit down as well- as I usually am doing a million things, cleaning spills and playing waitress to my preschoolers with the baby on my hip and just trying to shovel in bites where I can. I love dinner because we all sit down together. Wish I could figure out how to get my days better in gear with the littles. I also need to find a nourishing replacement for a cookie or ice cream when they all go down for naps at 2 and I’m looking for something to comfort away the crazy of the day. Thanks for your post!

I particularly the line about comfort food being the closest thing to time travel. It’s very true. I remember family vacations mostly by what foods I experienced when we travelled. I remember the buttermilk biscuits and fried rabbit my aunt made, the schnitzel and the walnut ice cream in Germany when visiting my Oma and Opa, the smell of fresh bread and the lovely baked goods beautifully presented in a bakery when we lived in Jersey (I was about 18 months old at the time), the bologna sandwiches and soda that were a staple in the cooler on family road trips, the lemon soufflé at an awards dinner and a myriad of others too numerous to mention. And although I choose to eat what is both delicious and best for my health and well being, I’m 13 again when I happily dive into a bowl of mom’s beef stew – safe, loved and happy.